


Streetlights

by Sunlite



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Angst, But only a little, Gibson's Real Name Is Philippe Hugo Guillet, Gibson's point of view, Hurt/Comfort, I know I KNOW, M/M, Mildly mute Gibson, Modern AU, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, Time Travel AU, but not sad, did i mention that, extremely rare, for now, he can talk, i just. need to figure out archive, i lied its sad, language barriers, not too slow but it burns, there will be more chapters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-25
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2019-12-07 21:01:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18240143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunlite/pseuds/Sunlite
Summary: Gibson is long gone by the time Tommy catches up with him. It only takes wind and a little bit of hope to fly.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey
> 
> I've been wanting to do this one for a while. At first, it was just kind of this nagging to write, but i'm glad it turned into what it is.

Philippe finds him asleep on his couch.

 

The man is curled up against it, an unfamiliar blanket supporting his head even though he doesn't really need it to because he could sleep just as easily without it. His legs are tucked into his chest, and his boots are dangerously muddy - he really doesn't want to clean that off.

 

There are no muddy footprints leading up to the couch. And from where Philippe is standing, it doesn't look like he came from a window either. Like he just appeared.

 

Philippe debates calling the police because he is definitely not from here by the likes of it, he looks like a French WWII cosplayer. Just not... right. His town is much too small to not know anyone who cosplays as (in?)accurately as this. It doesn't really matter, because Philippe's been standing there long enough for the grocery bags to slip from his fingers and crash to the ground. He instinctively almost mutters out a curse, but he knows it will all just be one dreadfully long stutter, so he lets himself breathe out the M of _Merde_ before he stops, frantically picking up the groceries that had fallen and putting them back into the bag.

 

When he looks back up, the man is staring at him.

 

He's sat up and is staring at him with impossibly wide eyes, and Philippe really does almost consider calling the police before the man says, “Gibson?”

 

(Philippe can recognize it's a name. It's not his, so maybe it was the others? Why was it a question?)

 

Then the man is saying something else, but it isn't French - which, which really explains a lot. It's much shakier and holds much more emotion, but it sounds British, or American at least - he's heard the accent before in bigger cities, in places where tourists actually want to come, outside of his small town. The man starts to stand up, so Philippe does too, holding the grocery bags now protectively against his chest as if the man had offended him. He should _probably_ be calling the police.

 

And then the man is tackling him to the ground, spilling out all his groceries now, and Philippe thinks _this man is going to kill me,_ so he struggles to push him off but stops when he realizes the man is _hugging_ him. And his coat feels kind of gritty and stiff, in the way that wool does when it's wet. And the man's chest is heaving and he is crying, feels the tears stain his shirt.

 

This turned out to be a much stranger night than expected.

 

He rubs the man’s back awkwardly, wincing again at the grittiness, and when he looks at his hand it's sand, still partially wet, which is even stranger because there is certainly not a beach around in thousands of miles. The man is still trying to talk, but Philippe just hums in his throat as a response and that's enough to send him full-fledged into sobbing.

 

For the millionth time in his life, Philippe wishes he could talk.

 

When he was two years old he had gotten into a car crash - violent enough to send him flying out the car and rolling against the pavement. He was lucky to live, but he had gotten a cracked skull, a concussion, and a majority of the nerves in his vocal cords damaged when he first hit the ground. His father, who had been driving, wasn't as lucky and died on impact. Philippe was fine to theoretically talk - just with a horrible stutter that would leave him trying to say anything longer than _**a**_ word empty-handed for five minutes, so he decided to just Not Talk.

 

And now there was supposedly a language barrier between him and the man as well, so things were not looking great. All Philippe can really do is shush him, rub his back and let him cry it out. It seemed well appreciated because the man just squeezed him tighter, which he didn’t really appreciate, because now he couldn’t breathe. His grip loosens and tightens in waves, as does his sobs. Philippe wishes he could say something, really, because maybe the words would soothe him - halt the crying into hiccups, at least.

 

He remembers distantly he has a whiteboard on his refrigerator, magnetic and blurry with use.

 

He gently tries to shove the man off him, soft nudges that turn to pushes, but he grapples straight back onto him. He’s at least moved enough so that he’s sat up, but the man is kind of all over him now, tucked into his shoulder. _“No,”_ the man sobs, and he can understand that at least. The word is universal, after all. Philippe gives up.

 

_“S’il vous_ _plaît_ _,”_ he says, although his voice is rough with the lack of use and it takes him an embarrassingly long time to stutter out, but he’s praying he’s getting the message across.

 

_Please._

 

It does something because the man lifts his head the minute Philippe begins stuttering, the word repeating in his head but the shapes barely being able to be choked out of his mouth, a horrible irritating agony that he can’t just get the word _out._ He’d rather stab himself in the throat with a knife and leave it there, because then maybe people would understand he doesn’t speak, maybe then it’d be obvious. Maybe then, people would still make him. While the man’s crying seems to halt as he watches him form the words, it doesn’t seem to register. He’s furrowing his eyebrows and muttering, and then he hugs _him,_ like Philippe was the one who was crying his eyes out.

 

It’s very strange.

 

Philippe accepts the hug but pulls back again, making the gesture to stand up as he rises to his feet. The man does, albeit miserably as if he never wanted to move again. As if sobbing his eyes out in Philippe’s arms was the only place he wanted to be. The pestering thought that _this is an intruder_ is still lingering in his mind, but it doesn’t feel like he was dangerous. He just seemed lost. In time or mentally, whatever. He didn’t have much tying him down to life anyway if the man who sobbed in his arms ends up brutally murdering him. He guides him to the kitchen, slowly, as if walking at all was going to get him tackled again. His groceries were still spilled all out over the floor.

 

He reaches the whiteboard on the fridge and begins writing questions on it frantically, and when he holds it up, the man seems to stare at it in more of confused terror at the whiteboard than the real words, so he erases and tries again.

 

_Philippe_ , he writes, with an arrow pointing up at him. The man smiles at that, before hesitatingly grabbing the board and marker out of his arms.

  


_Tommy,_ the man writes, with an arrow pointing up at him. He looks hopeful, waiting, a little impatient, the furrow between his eyebrows still scrunched and the tears still stained on his face.

  


He looks sad.

 

He smiles and reaches out his hand to shake, and everything about Tommy slumps at that. He shakes it, before looking around his kitchen, eyes caught on the calendar. His eyes widen, before frantically going to the whiteboard after tucking it under his arm, struggling with the cap of the marker for a few seconds, shaky hands.

 

He thrusts out the whiteboard, eyes furrowed a little differently. Angry. Scared.

 

_1940,_ it says. He glances at the calendar. Philippe’s heart drops to his gut. He shakes his head no because _Non_ would never be the right words.

 

Tommy points and taps at the board, shaking his head and saying something in disbelief. Philippe responds by shaking his head no in return, walking carefully around him and pointing at the date on the calendar. _2019,_ he taps. He tries to convey the apology in his eyes. Tommy shakes his head again, scared, and is saying something else, much louder than he’s heard him speak before, much more than the sobs and constant need to be near.

 

_I’m sorry,_ he says with his eyes, but Tommy is not looking at him.

 

Tommy’s eyes are wide and impossible, and suddenly he’s running out of his room and bursting through his front door. Philippe tries to follow, but trips on the groceries still all over the floor, slams his knee on the wooden floor. It’s a burst of pain, but when he stumbles back to his feet and rushes outside, Tommy is long gone, taking his whiteboard with him.

 

________________________________________________________

  
  


Philippe is tired when he clocks into his shift at _Des Abeilles Librarie_ , but most of all he is bitter.

 

His knee was bruised and most of his groceries had to be thrown out, save the milk that hadn’t spilled against all odds. He was pretty sure Tommy hadn’t robbed him, because it was far too strange and complex to rob only a whiteboard after all that. He didn’t think Tommy was insane, really, either because he was - he was -

 

He had to be honest with himself.

  


If the confused stare at the date and the frantic _1940_ Tommy had written had anything to go by (plus the getup, the not-french WWII uniform, the wet wool and the gritty sand, the haircut and the _look_ in his eyes) Tommy was a man lost in time. Which, sounded stupid when he thought about it, but he wasn’t going to lie, he was pretty interested in the whole time travel idea.

 

_(“Je punch Hitler,” the man across the bar from him says to his friend in very drunk, very broken French as a reply to his time traveling question, and Philippe frowns. He thinks you’d have to punch a lot more people than just Hitler if you wanted to end that war before it began.)_

 

There wasn’t any other explanation to it, either - Tommy had ended up on his couch nearly soaked, no trail to it, no window or door unlocked or busted, sobbing his eyes out at the mere sight of Philippe, who probably didn’t know a lick of French, who had insisted it was 1940 and was clad in a WWII British uniform (he had looked it up, if only to prove Tommy’s existence was real, if the mess left behind was any proof of it) covered in sand, even though there wasn’t a beach in thousands of miles. And, then he had run off - Philippe had stayed up all night, wondering what the hell had happened, wondering if Tommy was okay, if he was going to get sick, because it had been raining all night and hadn’t stopped, even after the sun rose.

 

The nice part about working at _Des Abeilles Librarie,_ though, was that it was fairly quiet and calm, opting as not only a bookstore but as a library of sorts, too. They didn’t get much traffic, just enough to keep running, which was nice because on days like these when it was mostly empty he could just do the task of reshelving books, and not try to manage the cash register without having to say anything at all. He didn’t mind having to carry loads of books - heavy as they were - usually. Just Tommy didn’t come back and he stole his whiteboard and he was bitter, but that was probably the best part of suffering in silence.

 

Nobody had to know.  There was no fear of lashing out accidentally, because he wasn’t going to. He couldn’t.

 

The rest of the day passes slowly, and on his lunch break he sits on the front steps and watches the rain come pouring down. It pauses, for an hour or so, after he leaves and goes back to work - but he can hear it pick up again, an hour later, hidden between the rows of the history section. If he focuses hard enough, it stops sounding like waves.

 

His shift is over a quarter past noon, and he waves goodbye to his manager as he clocks out, so she knows he’s leaving. He’s shoving his partly broken umbrella open over his head when he sees him across the street.

  


Drenched in the rain, shivering violently. Eyes still piercing, his coat which once seemed a gross olive green almost entirely black. Misplaced. Something you see in a black-and-white photo, deformed, colorized. His whiteboard is gone.

  


Philippe silently curses, quickly glancing both ways before rushing across the street, stopping just close enough so that the umbrella covers Tommy. He’s shaking badly and he’s frighteningly pale, he seems so close to being an actual ghost. Philippe wraps his arm around Tommy before leading him back across the street, to the original destination of the store’s parking lot. Tommy keeps stumbling, and he nearly freezes up at the sight of Philippe’s car, but Philippe continues to drag him to the passenger door because he is much more concerned on keeping him alive than considering how awful it must feel to be reminded you’re 79 years in the future, in France, with no idea how you got there or how to get back, potentially now with hypothermia, close to death, _probably_ not for the first time. Philippe stops thinking.

 

He starts his car and immediately blasts the heat, turning them so they all faced Tommy. He made sure to reach over and grab at Tommy’s seatbelt, because he couldn’t imagine seatbelt laws were very common in nineteen fucking forty, before strapping in his own and pulling out of the parking lot as fast as possible. The drive is mostly quiet, minus Tommy’s sharp breathing as he curled his legs into his chest, and eventually, Tommy reaches out and holds his hands up to the warm air coming from the vents.

  


_“Merci,”_ Tommy says, and Philippe is a little hopeless after all.

  


Philippe is lucky to have a home instead of an apartment, but the houses are awfully cheap here. They aren’t very old surprisingly either, the floorboards creak and the stairs and hallways are narrow in almost all of them, including his own, but that's how most houses are. He lives a little on the outskirts but he didn’t have any land, and the oldest thing was probably the barn next to his house, which is really just where he parked and -

 

He’s frantically going around the car the minute he parks it and turns off the ignition to help Tommy out and reaching back in to grab his umbrella, and he nearly runs to his back door, fumbling with the keys before unlocking it, dragging Tommy inside. He’s running through all the immediate things to do, because when Philippe was seven he ran away from home, because his mother was in a constant cycle of step-dad after step-dad, and he’s trying to remember what she did when he came home. It snaps pretty quickly.

  


He leads Tommy to his bedroom and immediately starts rummaging through his drawers to find something that would fit him. They were almost the same height, Philippe only being a little shorter, so it wasn’t too difficult to find something. He holds out a bundle to him, which Tommy takes, a little confused. He points him to the bathroom, and gently tugs at Tommy’s coat before gesturing at the clothes. _Change._

  


The recognition flashes through Tommy's eyes, and he nods quickly, before going to the bathroom. Philippe immediately rushes to grab as many blankets as he can, before almost tripping down the stairs and shoving a few in his dryer, which is at least as old as him and sounds like a car trying to run over the house. He considers laying out out the blanket Tommy appeared with, and setting it up with all the other blankets he could find that wasn’t in the dryer (he assumed being immediately blanketed in warmth wasn’t good) but stops when he notices there are oil streaks in it, fingerprints and markings where Tommy’s head was, but then the same exact markings on the other side of the folded blanket. Like it had been swapped. Mirrored.

  


There’s the soft padding of footsteps coming down the stairs, and when Philippe leans over to see through the living room's doorway, Tommy is there, clad in his pajamas and holding out his sopping wet clothes away from himself awkwardly. He’s still shivering, but it isn’t nearly as bad as it was before. Philippe smiles, encouragingly, and gestures to come sit down in the mass of blankets he just made. He topples all of them on Tommy the minute he sits down, who snorts in response, and pauses before leaving the room. He knows the word, but he still pulls out his phone to make Google say it for him.

  


_“Film?”_ the robotic voice says, and Tommy raises his eyebrows as Philippe gestures wildly at his TV. He says something before nodding, and Philippe leans over to turn the TV on. There are plenty of English channels to go by, although most of them are reruns because not every bit of everything reaches the world fast enough. The news seems to be the only thing that keeps up, so he leaves it on BBC and the remote with Tommy who’s eyes immediately widen at the screen and the English blaring through.

  


He should probably be more considerate with the technical stuff, but - it’s been 79 years. He doesn’t know every bit of what was and wasn’t like Tommy does. The guilt still eats at him.

  


He takes the oil-stained blanket and Tommy’s clothes and hides it away on the shelves in his laundry room. He pulls the other blankets out and returns to the living room, where Tommy looks on the verge of tears. Philippe lays the blankets on and around him one by one, this time, and frowns at Tommy, trying to ask all the questions he can’t say.

  


Tommy just looks back at him, eyes an endless blue. He’s scared. He’s confused, but he’s stubborn. He’s trusting. He’s alive and he shouldn’t be. He doesn’t know why he’s here. He’s scared, but not of him.

  


Philippe feels so incredibly exposed and vulnerable that he realizes he still has his shoes on. He’s also still in his work uniform, and there are splotches of water on his shirt from the rain and Tommy. He toes his shoes off and plops down next to him, and after a pause, gently grabs the remote laying next to him to turn the TV off.

  


Tommy stares at him. Philippe pulls out his phone.

  


“I am sorry,” the phone says for him. He can’t trust translate will be entirely accurate, but. It’s the best chance. Tommy frowns and says something, but Philippe shakes his head in response and delicately hands him the phone, showing him the flip languages, the keyboard, the speak aloud button, all with apologetic eyes. Tommy seems in awe, before typing.

  


_“Don’t be,”_ the voice says back. Philippe shakes his head, before taking the phone again.

  


“No, you are in the future,” He says. And then, “I’m sorry.”

  


_“But you’re still here,”_ Tommy’s robotic voice says, and Philippe has to blink for a few seconds to interpret what he’s trying to say.

  


“Still?” He tries asking, but Tommy just smiles warmly at that, and he tries again. Different still.

  


_“You do not remember?”_ Tommy types out, and the warm look has long died. Scratch that; he seemed devastated, blank. Philippe can’t bear to look at him anymore and shakes his head. He can’t say there wasn’t anything to remember. He can’t just say that.

 

“Gibson,” Tommy suddenly says aloud, and there’s that name again. Philippe’s eyes widen as he realizes that it’s supposed to be his name. Tommy begins typing frantically, almost as frantically as he writes.

 

_“You saved me more times than I can count,”_ The robot says, a little broken and wrong. _“You must remember that.”_

  


Philippe doesn’t remember that. He assumes he probably did it often, as he stared at Tommy in a lump of blankets, barely shivering anymore. He gives him an apologetic glance and shakes his head again.

  


Tommy gives him the full story. Dunkirk. The running, being the lone survivor of his platoon. Of the beaches, of finding Gibson burying a body. The bombs, the boats, the sinking, the drowning, the repeats. The days going by, the risks back into houses for food or water, for something. Alex, who Gibson had also saved. The fishing boat, finding out Gibson was French, the holes, the water rushing in - and then he pauses for a while, long enough that Philippe knows he’s not just typing, and correcting the broken words the translator spits out.

 

Gibson dying, and Tommy not knowing until after he’d escaped.

  


Tommy slides the phone away, after that, seemingly done talking. He curls up further in the blankets, decidedly not looking at him. Philippe’s never been a people person, too awkward, too afraid of contact, but -

 

He gently leans over and wraps his arms around Tommy, albeit stiffly, pulling him into a hug. It is the scariest moment, because it is the easiest thing Philippe has ever done. Tommy accepts it just as easily, and his grip is much tighter. It seems like the right thing to do. There probably _isn’t_ a right thing to do. Tommy doesn’t cry this time, but he can’t imagine he does very much, anymore. That night was something different. It’s a lot harder to cry for the soft things after everything that you've been through, he almost knows. He almost relates.

  


The line is too thick for anything but almost. He doesn’t know Tommy. Maybe, if things are as twisted up as they seem, he did. Almost entirely. He probably used to understand what his voice sounded like with words that he could interpret, could know. He used to. Maybe.

  


His heart inevitably hurts.

  


_“Pardon,”_ he whispers, and it sounds warped even in his own ears. His voice is dry and scratchy, but he doesn’t stutter, because not every word is caught in the mess that is his vocal cords. He lives for the small words and hides for the rest. Tommy says nothing in return, just weakens the hug and pats his back. He knows what he’s trying to say.

  


_You have nothing to be sorry for._

  


Philippe is the one that almost cries, this time, and he lets out a choked laugh. This isn’t about him, though, so he pulls away and nods at Tommy, who gives a quick smile in return. _(He’s okay.)_ He grabs the phone again, a little bit behind him, because Philippe came closer than how far Tommy pushed it away. He types in the translator, again, tries to find the words.

  


“Do you have questions?” The robotic voice says, and he stares at Tommy, this time. He hands him the phone back when he reaches out.

  


_“About what?”_

  


“Anything.”

  


_“Not bad,”_ the translator says, and Tommy huffs when Philippe furrows his eyebrows, tries again when he realizes it wasn’t the right words. _“A lot.”_

  


Philippe lets him ask anything, and Tommy asks everything. They go through every brief bit of history he can imagine, because luckily most things come in English, and while he can’t understand much beyond the few keywords he knows and typical broken french subtitles, Tommy is able to understand everything.

 

The end of WWII. Hitler dead. Tommy visibly brightens at that, and he barely stops smiling. Japan. Hiroshima. The Holocaust, but briefly, because he doesn’t want to bombard him immediately with horrors. They can take it slow, documentaries and books are always around.

 

The sound barrier breaking. Commercial TV.  The Cold War. Vietnam. The moon landing. Rock and Roll. The Beatles. Abba. Queen. The first computer. Internet. Video games. Wireless phones, Apple, Star Wars, Google, the Twin Towers, _The_ Queen (now 92, who was last 14 to Tommy), Terrorist attacks, Gay rights, Trump, Brexit, Global warming, the bombing in France, Big Ben!

  


He can see Tommy’s head spinning. _“What happened to it?”_

 

Philippe gestures with his hand wildly, now laying low on his stomach. He translates the word, but he tries saying it aloud. “To be fixed,” He says, and it’s incredibly accented and he stumbles on the ‘b’ for a second, but it isn’t very long and Tommy’s still grinning anyway.

  


It’s dark outside and Tommy’s yawning when he realizes how much time has gone by, and he lets them finish watching a Marvel video before flicking back to the translator. “Food?” he says, because it’s just one word and despite his throat being raw with how much he’s suddenly started using it he desperately wants to understand. Tommy nods quickly, and he remembers with a quiet, painful pang that he probably hasn’t eaten since last night.

  


If there’s one thing he can do, though, it’s cook. Philippe has probably been cooking for himself since he could reach above the counter, because his mother was always out and away with someone new. He had plenty burn marks on his arms to show for it, and he could successfully bake amazing bread, after all the practice. He’s already running through lists of big recipes he knows and what ingredients he has by the time he’s up and wandered to the kitchen, searching the pantry for his recipe box. Unfortunately, though, he doesn't have everything he needs, so he ends up having to make spaghetti.

 

Tommy comes in the kitchen, eventually, with a blanket around his shoulders and intent on watching him cook. He snorts and starts giggling when he sees what Philippe is making.

  


_“Italie,”_ he responds, scrunching his nose, knowing exactly what he's laughing at. Tommy just laughs harder.

  


He has frozen vegetables in his freezer, which he is grateful for and can't recall buying at all, but the expiration date is far away and Tommy hasn't eaten in a day, so he tosses them in the microwave for 30 minutes and manages amused glances at Tommy watching it spin.

 

Overall, he thinks he did a good job - he fills up a plate and slides it over to Tommy, who almost melts before eating like a dying man (a man who has almost died, a man who has long since died) before Philippe puts what's left in the pan on his plate. It's -

 

It's incredibly domestic.

 

Tommy finishes long before he does, and steals his phone to look up more things on the internet, and is nearly passed out listening to Bing Crosby by the time Philippe has finished and put their plates in the sink. He gently shakes Tommy’s shoulder to wake up and delicately takes the phone away to turn the video off. When he just stares at him, Philippe jerks his head for him to follow.

 

The guest bedroom is upstairs next to his room. The windowsill is covered in dust since he rarely knows anyone well enough for them to stay over, but the bed is clean. He sidesteps so Tommy can come in, and he peers in curiously. Philippe was lucky to catch a 2 bed and bath house as a broke college kid before all the house prices went back up to the numbers they always were, and he was kind of living off of multiple jobs at a time to pay it off, but he wasn’t about to tell Tommy that. He doesn’t have a dresser in the room, but Tommy doesn’t have any clothes with him anyway. He’s already making a mental list of things to get or at least try to tomorrow. He knocks on the wall, making Tommy’s head swivel, and he points at the wall. _I’m over here,_ he tries to say.

  


Tommy nods. “Merci,” he says again. Even if it’s the only French word he’s said, Philippe smiles anyway.

  


Philippe is only a _little_ less worried about Tommy; he seems okay. Good, even. Just lost in time. He goes through his nightly routine, triple checks his phone is plugged in and the new list he’s made is there, along with many other reminders and fractured bits of a story, words that mull and trip in his head, all the things he wanted to say but couldn’t.

  


When he dreams, he dreams of nothing.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Blooms, grows, drowns.

________________________________________________________

  
  


When he wakes up, he’s not surprised to see Tommy still there.

  
  


The surprise came two days ago when Tommy didn’t come back. The surprise was him being there at all, really, of existing where he shouldn’t, of breaking the properties of time just to end up on his couch, dirty, scared, and back in France again.

  
  


It was early in the morning, where the sun was barely out and the sky was light with morning dew. It had stopped raining in the middle of the night, and spring was just barely turning the corner into summer, now, so it was undoubtedly going to be warmer. Philippe wakes a couple of minutes before his alarm, breathes in the comfort of being warm, of the morning, of the birds outside and the small moment of not existing at all. When he does get up he winces at the idea of work, of actually having to do anything. He is tired and still a little loopy when he wanders out of his room, and when he remembers with a wave of horrifying clarity that Tommy exists, again, and is in the guest room, he stops to peek through the door to see if he’s still there. If only out of fear. _(If only to assure his fears.)_

  


Tommy is still there. He is awake and propped up on his arms, back against the wall. He is staring back, and his eyes are a little wide, like he didn’t know he existed still either. The sun is ever rising into the sky and casts a blue glow into the room, the same unfamiliar layer that is Tommy’s eyes, like laying a blue filter over everything. He didn’t seem real. Or -

  


Ethereal.

  


Philippe blinks as he shakes back into himself after realizing how long he’s been standing there, and holds up his finger as he pulls out his phone. He should probably just download the Translate app. Actually - he should find a French-English dictionary. “You’re awake,” it says. Tommy sits up fully and gestures to come closer.

  


_“I heard you,”_ Tommy translates after taking his phone, looking up at him from the screen.

  


“Sorry,” Philippe types in quickly. And then, “I have work all day.”

  


Tommy nods slowly, understanding. He’s turned his attention out the window, the fields of green behind his house, the flickered brown of a fence not too far away, of the farms next door. “You will be okay?”

  


He gives a weak smile as an answer. He seems impeccably tired. Like you’ve jumped 79 years into the future and the only remnant of the past is someone who doesn’t know you. He can’t imagine the last time Tommy probably slept in a bed, or if it was any good, either. There are traces of bags under his eyes, and he moves slow, content. Philippe feels like ruffling his hair. Like hugging him and apologizing profusely. Like taking multiple steps back and rewinding time, getting a picture, of not touching Tommy at all, letting him just exist and basking in that. He sighs and moves back, to the door. Away.

  
  


_“Dormir,”_ Philippe says seriously.

  
  


Tommy smiles in genuine, this time, and mutters something back. _I will._

  
  


Philippe smiles back, and closes the door behind him, slowly. He tries to move down the stairs as quietly as possible, as if he was afraid of making a sound, sliding around the places where he knew the wood creaks. He doesn’t head out immediately - he finds scraps of paper and tapes little notes all around the house for Tommy, in the familiar letters the translator provides him. How to use the remote. The stove, the kitchen, the house phone for emergencies, and no he would still know it was an emergency, even if Tommy couldn’t say anything he would understand.

  
  


When he does leave, he heads for work. He works at a local landscaping company on top of working at the library. He - he does a lot of bookkeeping.

  
  


He can barely keep his mind on work all day, despite loving both jobs. (He doesn’t like the people, mostly, but he does love the work.) He’s frequently jumping from making the growing list of things he needs to get for Tommy and chewing away at the billing of the landscaping, and he doesn’t get nearly enough of what he wants done, but he never does, and suddenly he’s clocking in and shelving a new shipment of Harry Potter books, and he realizes he hasn’t eaten all day.

  


He lets himself breathe. Tommy hadn’t called and he could probably interpret the notes. Maybe he just slept through the day, he seemed pretty tired. And, Philippe had plenty of time after work to get groceries. He could eat. He didn’t have to be this worried. He wasn’t. He catches the last thirty minutes of his lunch break he had worked through to grab food next door, and then he’s back through the routine again. He is not miserable. He’s not.

  


When he clocks out and goes to the grocery store, he makes sure to buy a new whiteboard, along with a box of pastries from the bakery and ridiculous fluffy socks with strawberries on it he saw on an advertising rack. It blooms something small in him - he hasn’t bought something for someone else in a long, long time. He hasn’t been excited to come home.

  
  


When he does come home, it’s all definitely worth it.

  
  


Tommy is partially passed out on the couch watching the history channel, about an Australian excursion where they look for WWI bullets and mapping out where they believe the front line was even if the ground is still one long hole next to them. and as Philippe stands there for a second, he deems the show as both as boring and as interesting as it sounds. When Tommy does notice him, he smiles and raises an eyebrow at the box in his hands.

  


_“Des pâtisseries,”_ Philippe says warmly, and stutters on the D despite his confidence. Unnoticed, as he sets the box on the coffee table and opens the box, the assortment of pastries not as warm as they were before. Tommy laughs and gently shoulders him in the arm, and it means a thousand things. He feels warm. Philippe smiles.

  
  


He could get used to this.

  
  


________________________________________________________

  
  


It’s days later at the kitchen table with an English-French dictionary sprawled between them that it happens.

  


“- Ah, family,” Tommy says, pointing at the translated word in the dictionary. Philippe nods, and repeats it back, heavily accented. They’ve been doing this for hours, and Tommy doesn’t seem to mind his stutter, or asks any questions about it. He only gets a little frustrated, but he tries desperately to hide it. Tommy seems to notice him quietly clenching and unclenching his fists though, but doesn’t say anything.

  


“No,” Tommy shakes his head, and scribbles out the I, because it's their book anyway. “Family,” he says, accenting the silence of it.

  


It dawns on him, then, Philippe can tell. Like waves easing away the tension - or, bringing it back, flickering and blooming until his face is slack, and his eyes are cold. His eyes are so blue and _alive,_ until it suddenly stops, frozen, dead. Thinking. Lost in his head, horror. Remembrance.

  


Tommy flips through the pages, pausing on a few until he finds the word he’s looking for. Philippe’s knuckles are suddenly white, gripping the edges of his seat.

  


“Jacket,” Tommy says, looking at him. They aren’t the eyes of Tommy When He Comes Home, or Tommy Who Can’t Cook But Tried, Tommy Laughing With The Crinkle Of His Eyes. This is someone different. This is -

  


Before.

  


Philippe nods, waves his hand he’ll be back, before heading to the laundry room. Tommy’s old jacket and clothes are still rumpled above his laundry machine, long since dried, but still gritty. He folds the jacket, gently, as if it would hide the creases he made by hastily throwing it into hiding, the attempt to hide away what clearly was. When he returns, Tommy sighs, soul-sucking, and it’s almost like Philippe can see the weight falling back on his shoulders. The reminder that he shouldn’t be here, that Tommy’s happiness is misplaced for something long gone. He takes it from his hands, gently, and rummages through the pockets.

  


He pulls out two photographs, torn and visibly frail from being wet. He just...holds them, and when Philippe turns to see, they’re very clearly destroyed. The images are warped in black splotches, only small pieces of what it used to be still visible behind the water damage. The second photo is the worst, destroyed beyond anything, with a horrifying unnatural red streak going through it, clearly not made by anything of water, like a mapped line where to cut, inhuman. His heart drops to his gut.

  


“I’m sorry,” Philippe says, because he’s made sure to know those words by heart. It’s never enough. It never will be.

  
  


Tommy just closes his eyes, and puts the photographs back away.

  
  


They don’t talk about it.

  
  


________________________________________________________

  
  
  
  


While Tommy’s French goes slow, barely growing beyond the basics, Philippe’s English flourishes. He’s always been a fast learner, anyway. His teacher used to tease him it was survival instincts. He spends every waking moment learning what he can, idling in the spaces between the bookstore a little longer than intended, dawdling through the pages of nameless books and connecting words together in his head.

  
  


Tommy spends most of his time listening to music, out of the list Philippe suggests him and what the rest of the world listens to. Most songs have certain noises that throw Tommy into a PTSD attack, and it takes him a long, long time to explore outside the jazz he’s used to, and Philippe hesitantly keeps reminding Tommy it’s okay to just like jazz, but he goes about listening to anything anyway.

  


He likes The Beatles. He likes Abba, and he likes Ella Fitzgerald, and only likes a little rock, because the flares of high notes on the electric guitar hurts his ears, and doesn’t sound like it’s singing to him, just a harsh accompanist. (And sometimes, like the sounds of bombs dropping, and Philippe will have to rush into the room and pretend like Tommy isn’t even more scared by his face, and hug him and whisper mixed jumbles of both French and English comforts, until either Tommy pushes him off or comes back.) He likes Paul Simon and Elton John, and surprisingly The Noisy Freaks. He’s still leaning into rap, but he likes Joji, and he likes Lo-Fi. But if there’s one band he likes the most, though, it’s Queen.

  
  


“It’s - its _own_ genre,” Tommy says, eyebrows furrowed, questioning most of the sounds he’s hearing. “It’s nothing at all.”

  
  


Philippe writes down and translates most of his recipes in broken English so Tommy can cook, and sets the translated version next to his actual recipe box. He catches Tommy singing along to one of Queen’s softer songs while cooking one day, chopping an onion. He doesn’t say anything about it, but his voice still haunts him in his sleep, like a forbidden memory.

  
  


They make multiple trips for clothes, and eventually, end up taking an old dresser off of one of the neighbors two miles away who’s too old to move it or have a use for it, and sells it to them for free. Tommy keeps the pajamas he stole even though he already has a couple of pairs of his own, and Philippe doesn’t protest. Anything that was his is theirs, now, anyway. Tommy doesn’t have any day clothes or any shoes, though, and while his paycheck to paycheck lifestyle weeps, he still drives the next town over to buy him some.

  


It’s a little awkward, for the most part, having to translate for Tommy to the workers that he doesn’t know his shoe size or where certain sections were, because he’s always refused to talk and now he’s suddenly talking more than he probably has in his entire life, and he has to stare down at his feet as he stutters out the accented words and pretend it’s just because he’s nervous, and not because his throat hurts like no tomorrow.

  
  


Tommy laughs, and Philippe snaps back into the present, looking up from a short-sleeved button-up dotted in flamingos. Tommy is smiling and holding up a Queen shirt, and it’s really just the word in the band’s loopy signature and nothing else for 17€, but he smiles back anyway and puts it in the pile to buy. Tommy picks most of the stuff out but continuously shakes his head at the prices in mild disbelief, and Philippe can’t imagine the inflation must be jaw-dropping. Or, at least concerning, but he grabs at least a few things Tommy shakes his head at and puts it in the pile. He’s never smiled as wide as he does around him, before, if at all for anyone. He thinks if he keeps this up, he’ll never stop smiling at all.

  


The Trying On Clothes part is the worst, because Philippe isn’t very useful. He can’t stop getting flustered and approves of everything, so Tommy has to make most of the decisions on what to get, which really is just price cuts. Tommy looks good in everything. Philippe tries not to think of the wool jacket hidden in his laundry room.

  
  


Overall, it’s a good day, and he only winces a little when the cashier announces the price. The drive back is quiet, and Tommy keeps staring at his new shoes, abandoning the old WWII boots he had appeared with in the back of the car. He wasn’t sure if it was healthy how much Tommy was trying to forget, or how much Philippe was encouraging it, but. There wasn’t really a rulebook on what to do. He was the one who experienced the horrors, not him. If he wanted to forget, that really was his choice.

  


When they come home ( _Home_ , for the both of them, foreign and strange and beautiful) Tommy helps him unload the clothes out of his car and pauses at the stairs when Philippe walks past to the laundry room. They set all the clothes on top of the washing machine and he pauses, for a second, trying to find the word.

  


“Ah - “ he hums, making a snipping motion with his hands and looking at Tommy.

  


“Scissors,” Tommy says easily, and Philippe nods quickly.

  


“Scissors.”

  


Tommy runs to the kitchen to grab them, and they dig out every tag and shove the pile of plastic remnants in a pile. They’re quiet, and he thinks he should be content, because today was good and it was such a fluid movement, the both of them. But - he’s terrified. There is an elephant in the room, just a shelf high. Most of the clothes are dark, so he just shoves all of them into the washer, praying it’ll be able to handle it.

  


“Do you think I’ll go back?” Tommy says quietly, and Philippe freezes, hand above the start button. He gives him a questioning look.

  


“Home,” he says. “1940.”

  


Philippe drops his hand, looks away, at the washing machine. At the buttons. At the clothes inside, unmoving. He wasn’t going to lie, the thought had crossed his mind, and it scared him. He didn’t want Tommy to just - disappear. Would he forget him? Would he just disappear, clothes and dresser and all, like he was never there? He can’t bear that. He couldn’t. He didn’t want to be alone anymore.

  


He doesn’t say anything. He barely moves at all.

  


He’s willing himself not to cry, because he knows he supposed to say something, but he doesn’t want to admit it. The anxiety in him had been building up for weeks, and he was crashing. He doesn’t even want to say it's possible, because maybe if he says something it’ll happen, and maybe if he doesn’t, it’ll still happen. His fists are clenched and he’s looking away, because it’s so, so hard not to cry. Losing people was always his weakness.

  


“Are you - “ Tommy pauses. He looks at him weakly, tears hot on his face. “Oh,” Tommy finishes, hesitates, and hugs him.

  
  


Like everything, Philippe is a quiet crier. It’s mostly just shame and embarrassment that even causes him to cry, just pure raw emotion. And he is, he's _scared_ , and _ashamed_ and _embarrassed_ , and he feels so, so small. He'd resided to being alone a distantly long time ago, much younger than he should've been at the time. He didn't have friends or family, at least none that stuck around. The few that did, for longer than a week and by obligation, were always the most painful to go. He didn’t want Tommy to just disappear - that couldn’t be selfish.

  


He lets himself hug Tommy back, because if he’s going to be emotional about it, he’ll take what he can. He sniffles, once and awhile, and Tommy just pats his back, real and solid, not dead, not gone. He pushes away, after a while,, and waves a hand when Tommy looks at him, worried and unconvinced. He would reassure him, tell him he’s fine and he just really doesn’t want him to leave, but his voice is always a wreck after he cries. Like adding an extra layer of sandpaper, and rubbing it against a wound. He turns to the washing machine, the blinking lights and unmoving clothes.

  
  


He hits the start button.

  
  


________________________________________________________

  
  
  


One of Philippe’s favorite things is the movie nights.

  
  


Tommy has never seen basically any movie. Marvel comics were barely even in existence when he was a kid, so he didn’t know superheroes, and animated Disney movies had come an extremely long distance, so there was never anything not to watch. They watched something new almost every night, but the gaps in between were really just when nothing came in from the library or what he could bootleg online, with French subtitles.

  


Tommy loves every movie. He disagrees partly with the ones based when he was alive - because, of course he would, he was _alive_ \- but he loves all of them. The first animated movie Philippe can get in is Monster’s Inc, and Tommy freaks out. At first, he’s concerned, because maybe it was too early, and he should’ve built up more, but Tommy’s smiling and the intro with Sulley getting up is playing in the background, and he’s shaking Philippe like he’s trying to get him to see what he saw.

  
  


“I love it,” Tommy says seriously at the end of the movie, and he smiles.

  
  


He’s been trying to get the Queen movie since the third day of Tommy living with him, but it’s all booked by the library and it’s finally going to come in tomorrow. He hasn’t said a word of its existence to Tommy, but he wouldn’t be surprised if he’d already found out about it. Tonight, though, as he closes the back door behind him and toes off his shoes, wandering into the living room in his socks with an armful of McDonald's bags, they’re watching The Man from U.N.C.L.E. It’s secretly Philippe’s favorite spy movie and he’s kind of extra nervous because it involves hunting down nazi’s and he isn’t sure how Tommy is going to feel about it, and it involves drowning which he knows throws him into a closed-off state, even if this time it’s just a boat burning and sinking and a truck being driven into a moat as the main character sits inside and sadly eats a sandwich, which hopefully brings nothing back to Tommy, so.

  


He’s nervous.

  


Once he’s settled down next to Tommy, fast food in front of them, Tommy pauses the movie before it begins.

  


“Time?” he asks, and it’s tradition, time period and general idea, so he doesn’t confuse what’s happening with the when and where. It started when he confused the moon landing with the movie Alien, which, really was his fault for not explaining through anyway. Philippe can’t imagine what Tommy thought 2019 was going to be like back then, what the future would be like. Aliens and space travel like that probably wasn’t out of the realm.

  


“1960,” he says, and Tommy nods, before going back to the remote and continuing.

  


It’s great. They leave off the French subtitles because it’s harder with the German mixed in there when they speak it in the movie, and generally confusing, and Philippe is trying to learn English anyway. It’s easier when he knows the plot of the movie, so he can piece together the words in his mind when he recognizes the syllables, so familiar and different when not from Tommy, accented by different nationalities. Tommy tears through both of their fries in record time, and he’s only able to steal a few before attempting to fill the rest of the void with the macarons from the McCafe. Tommy’s never had one, so he lets him steal a few.

  


It doesn’t even occur to him what's happening until the truck is being driven into the water, and Tommy shoots out his hand and grabs his in record speed, tight, eyes still on the screen. He freezes up, but adjusts his grip and rubs Tommy’s hand in comfort, trying to be a reminder. His grip tightens in Philippe’s when the headlights drop over Illya, limp and sinking in the water, drowning.

  


“It’s okay,” Philippe says, even though they both know it’s not.

  


Tommy doesn’t let go of his hand for the rest of the movie, but he doesn’t think he’d let him if he did anyway. He’s completely zoned out of the movie, focused more on Tommy and rubbing the spaces in between his fingers, reading all his expressions even if he isn’t very expressive. His eyes say a lot.

  


Tommy is still looking at the screen by the time the credits have rolled through, a little glazed. He shakes their held hands a little, and Tommy snaps back, looks at their him and then their hands, taking it as a single to pull away. He doesn’t let him, and just shakes them again. When Tommy meets his eyes, he nods, a little slowly. Saying all the words he physically can’t at once. _Are you okay?_

  


He clears his throat. “Yeah.”

  
  


_Okay,_ he nods, and gently slips his hand away. He grabs the empty fast food bag, and wanders away to the kitchen, glancing back only a few times. Tommy is already upstairs and in his room by the time he comes up, and he can only tell because the door is closed and the window at the end of the hall, which he usually just lets flicker in the moonlight, has the blinds closed. He feels a doom worthy, impending sense of dread, and stops by Tommy’s door.

  
  


Flickers.

  
  


_“Bonne suit,”_ he says to the door, and it and nothing else says anything back.

  
  
  


________________________________________________________

  
  
  


When he dreams, it’s the same dreams he’s had since he could remember.

  


He’s a kid again. Or, maybe he’s not - he’s old and frail. He’s eight. He’s a hundred and one. He’s twenty-two, like he’s always been. It’s dark, void of any light, but he knows he’s underwater. It’s the same sound when you’re in a bathtub, holding your breath, just listening to the muted sounds of your feet clinking against the edge, except this time, it’s the creaking of metal, and a fish sliding against your feet. Something old, something ancient.

  


He feels heavy.

  


Heavy in every sense. The clothes he’s wearing are heavy, there’s a chain wrapped around his right leg, pinning him, rusted and heavy, but it’s deteriorating. One day it’ll be gone, along with him, and he can go. He can leave the rusted dark, he knows. But he doesn’t. He feels heavy, like he knows he’s done something horribly, horribly wrong, and he’s waiting for it all to start coming down around him. Something is terribly wrong. The metal creaks and he realizes he is not alone.

  


There is someone here.

  


He can’t see them, because it is so, so dark, but he knows they’re there. He’s whipping his head around frantically, looking for a sign, a direction. Someone is here, stuck between watching and being him, in his boots and his eyes. They’re him, they’re across the boat, they’re on top of it, they’re a billion and a half miles away, standing on the moon and looking down. He tries to say something, but all that comes out of his mouth are air bubbles, and the fish jerk around, a little more cautious. Nothing comes out of theirs, and they stand, and they watch. There is air coming out of his mouth, and he can’t mouth the words because he’s every age he’s ever been, and he’s a skeleton, and he’s so young he doesn’t even know how to speak yet, and he’s so injured with the tubes and the bandage around his throat he can’t speak at all.

  


He hears waves. He is nowhere near land, for absolute sure, but he hears them. He looks up, like he’ll see light or something flickering above, but it’s just dark. A metal roof. Metal walls. Something yanks the chain wrapped around his leg back, and he’s pulled, until his head slams against the wall.

  
  


Philippe sits up, gasping for air, hand around his throat.

  
  


He’s in his room. It’s dark, and he’s heaving for air, and something is _terribly, terribly wrong._

  


He immediately throws himself out the bed and slams open his door, practically fleeing to Tommy’s, and doing the exact same to his door. Tommy is awake, and he’s crying, loud heaving sobs, gripping the sheets like it’s his lifeline. He barely notices he’s there, a small surprised glance before he’s burying his face in his legs and opting for shoving his hands in his hair instead. Philippe hurries over and takes Tommy's hands out of his hair and into his own, rubbing and comforting, like he always does. But Philippe's throat is so, so dry, and he can't imagine he could get anything out that wasn't a sad dying moan. There are no words he could say. This is the worst storm yet.

  


He moves Tommy's hands to his face, holds his palms to his cheeks. When he looks at him, confused, terrified, not entirely there, Philippe mouths all the words he cannot say. _I'm right here._

  


Tommy shakes his head, denying. _I'm right here,_ he mouths again, pressing his hands. He sobs harder, and pushes forward to hug him, and even though it nearly topples Philippe over and Tommy's knees are bent a little awkwardly around his and he is hate, hate, hate, _hating_ every bit of physical contact, he hugs him back.

  
  


_I'm right here._


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A hurricane.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took so long,, i'm not going to give excuses - it was my fault. I am sorry if next week there isn't anything, too, though, it is finals.

________________________________________________________

  
  
  
  


They don’t talk about it when the morning comes.

  
  


Philippe had slept with  Tommy after he had cried himself to exhaustion in his arms. It wasn’t an option to move, to slink back to his room. He could never. He _would_ never.

  


He barely got any sleep, and any that he did wasn’t very good. After Tommy passed out he gathered him up in his arms and slid him to the other side of the bed, back under the covers. He stayed on top of them, despite the cold. Leaving wasn’t an option, but neither really was scaring Tommy again. Waking up to someone next to him might be bad, he didn’t know. He didn’t want to push.

  
  
  


Tommy didn’t want to talk about it in the morning but - he wanted to.

  
  


“Okay?” Philippe asks, when he hears his feet pad down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he resides near the coffee machine. He’s extremely glad its a Sunday, he’s so tired he can’t imagine actually working right now. He wants to sleep a hundred years and never mention the metaphor again. He doesn’t say anything.

  
  


Philippe breathes, struggles, and tries again. He’s thinking the words in French and digging to say it in English, for his voice not to give out, what was once a blessing. “Was that you?” he strains, stuttering violently all the way.

  
  


Tommy freezes. That’s something. _Yeah,_ Tommy says with his eyes. _It was me. It was me._ Philippe shifts, leaning against the counter. _I know,_ he tries to say. And, _I thought so._ Tommy’s eyes flicker with understanding, the message crossed before he’s looking away at the potted plant on the kitchen windowsill, at the small dining table he ordered on Amazon.

  
  


They move fluidly. It’s almost as if it’s a practiced motion, the way they move around each other. The coffee drips from the Keurig slowly, and suddenly then all too fast, and he’s pulling his mug away while Tommy wanders over and slides a new one under the machine, side-eyeing the sticky note he’d pasted on the counter next to it listing directions in broken English, which he should probably correct. He reaches around him for the creamer he set aside, and Tommy moves for a coffee filter. He thinks of ocean waves and sea foam, of a heartbroken mermaid turning into dust as the waves lapped away at her being, and Philippe’s blood runs cold, his hands frozen.

 

Tommy moves to sit at the cramped dining table and nurse his coffee, and he stays to turn on the oven and crack eggs into a pan. It’s a thoughtless motion, he’s too caught in reality to measure the movements. He wants to talk about it. He clears his throat, but then it turns to a coughing fit, and he raises a hand to signal he’s okay. His throat is dry.

  
  


“I - I want to talk,” Philippe says, staring at Tommy.

  
  


“Okay,” Tommy breathes, the morning blue from the window next to him making him glow. He looks like an oil painting. By Pierre Bonnard himself.

  


“I hate...you being stuck,” He says, slowly, finding the English on his tongue a lot less heavy in stutters than in French. It’s probably the shape of the rapid French that’s always caught him when he thinks about it. Tommy just stares blankly, asking the question without saying anything. “House,” he finishes exasperated, pausing to flip the egg in the pan.

  
  


Philippe did hate Tommy being stuck in the house all the time. He was so much more, really. He’d managed to make little flowers grow out of the grass next to the front door when he could barely grow anything in the unluckily bad soil, he could drink him under the table no matter what he was drinking (not including vodka, which they both solidly agreed would be a bad idea to involve in the contest), Philippe was unfortunate to find out - Tommy was the kind of drunk who got giggly when he did, which he was a big help to, because he was the kind of drunk to melt on the floor and get cuddly, dragging Tommy down with him. He was a fantastic artist, despite his discomfort and pointed silence whenever Philippe complimented or smiled at the detailed little whiteboard drawings of the things around him, whether it was the window view outside or of the bowls stacked in the kitchen cabinet. He could probably make friends with anyone if he wanted to. Philippe wants him to. He scrapes the eggs out of the pan and onto a plate, wandering just close enough to hand it to Tommy before returning to lean on the counter and thumb at his coffee.

  


He wanted to talk about the dream. About - him being there, what it meant, that it was okay, or if it wasn’t. He wanted to talk about Tommy’s PTSD and what it was, that he wasn’t crazy and they shouldn’t ignore it. But it’s not like he had practice with these things, of talking to people about serious things or of talking about anything, actually. He hates the way his voice sounds and the stutters and the annoyed expressions of others as they wait for him to spit it out, even though he’s repeated the sentence in his head at least a billion times over by then. Tommy is the only person he’s willingly talked to. Not even his mom could do that.

  
  


His stomach tied itself in a knot, and he remembers to forget she existed again.

  
  


“I want to show you places,” Philippe says, tapping his fingers around the mug of his coffee, trying not to focus on the stutters or how many times he’s repeated the sentence in his head. “Outside this house. Just, the town, anywhere,”

  
  


Tommy leans back in the chair, looking at the table, as if thinking. Probably thinking. It’s a lot harder to see what’s going through his head when he’s looking away, his eyes are vibrantly expressive in all the ways others aren’t. “Then show me,” he says, meeting his eyes.

  
  


So he does.

  
  


The first thing Philippe does after they've eaten is introducing him to all the neighbors, because he knows they have been wildly nosey about Tommy’s sudden existence anyway. The first is the elderly couple next door, still aggressively running their farm. He smiles when they say hello, and gently elbows Tommy when they ask who he is.

  


_Name,_ Philippe mouths, and his eyes widen in understanding.

  


_“Je m’appelle Tommy,”_ he says, and his pronunciation is practiced as his eyes snap between Philippe and the elderly couple. _“Je suis Anglais.”_

  
  


They are silent at this, a little cold, before the old woman - Elsa - speaks. “Thought you looked English,” she says, smiling coyly. He tries desperately not to smile as Tommy flusters.

  
  


It’s a solid repeat of that, from house to house. Most wave them goodbye and leave them with goods, despite the family with seven children, despite the tired caretaker of the ninety-year-old man, who Tommy gets dangerously quiet around. He knows what he’s thinking, this time. When they bid their goodbyes, and when they’re climbing back into his car, Philippe has to pause. His grip on the closed car door becomes iron tight as the waves and waves of guilt hit him. He wavers, but he clears his throat and starts the car.

  
  


He should have never brought him there.

  
  


The next place he takes him is the library, which Tommy recognizes as where he saw him when standing across the street in the pouring rain, drenched. Philippe tells him that it's where he works and introduces him to everyone on shift, including his boss.

  


“Didn't think you'd ever find someone,” she jabs, her French thick and a little foreign. Philippe pales and stumbles through an explanation, and she just laughs as Tommy's eyes flit between them, a barrier in language.

  


She rings them up to get Tommy’s picture and he gets a library card, and it barely costs Philippe a euro with the employee discount for getting someone into the library, but he’d spend a thousand to see the slow smile that begins to rise on Tommy’s face again, glowing. He thinks he’s seen every smile until he can’t breathe all over again at the ones he's never seen before. They roam the sections, both looking for something to read and Tommy picks only a couple of books before halting suddenly in the Classics section, eyes glazing over the covers.

  


“What’s this?” Tommy asks quietly, pulling a book off the shelf. He acts as if he’s supposed to be quiet. It was sort of a bookstore, too, he could be as loud as he needed over here. Philippe eyes him anxiously before gently taking the book from his hands.

  


_“_ _La Voleuse de livres,”_  he stutters back, equally as quiet. “The Book Thief.”

  


“What’s it about?” he asks, head tilted and eyebrows furrowed at the cover. Dominos. Philippe’s heart sinks, crushes, caves in, and freezes over all at once. Hands shaking, just a little, he opens up to the description on the inside of the book.

  
  


“It is 1939, Nazi Germany,” he breathes quietly. Tommy’s entire being freezes up, the immediate tension thickening so violently around him he can almost feel the other books rattle in their place out of fear, the shelves creaking. “Death has never been busier and will be busier still. Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with her foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Liesel steals books. This is her story and the story of the inhabitants of her street when the bombs begin to fall.”

  
  


The words feel harsh. Harsher than anything he could ever have said. His voice only catches him a few times, barrels through and then scratching on a word like a broken record, and it makes it so much worse. They say nothing, and Philippe slowly raises his eyes to look at Tommy. His eyes aren’t cold, but aren’t warm. There are swirls of blue fighting through them, like a stormy sea crashing into another, battling for dominance, or middle ground. They are so, so empty - but full. Of sadness, of hate, of joy and hysteria, love and fear, something very, very ancient. He thinks if he looks too hard, Tommy will become transparent, his voice an echo of a watery voice, a ghost.

  
  


Philippe closes the book and looks away.

  
  
  
  


________________________________________________________

 

 

 

 

After they’ve traveled almost all the places Philippe wanted to take him, plastic bags full of books constantly in hand, they stop by the hardware store.

  


Philippe buys seeds. Sunflowers, rainbow roses, lilies and poinsettias, rosemary and Irises. He buys a bag of soil and planters, and Tommy doesn’t question it as he helps him heave the bag onto the counter, watches the price of everything he bought slightly get higher and higher as his wallet weeps. It’s pretty self-explanatory. On the drive back, Tommy grips the plastic bag close to him like it’s his lifeline, and he feels horrible.

  


He jumps out of the car when Philippe parks it in the broken and old barn, too, running up to the house with the bag of books under one arm and all the tools and seeds under the other. It leaves Philippe to heave the bag of soil, and by the time he’s toed his door shut and turned around Tommy is already inside the house and turning all the lights on. He tries to not think about how fast of a runner he is because it makes his arms weak and the desperate need to throw up grows. He feels awful. Everything feels wonderful.

  
  


Bittersweet.

  
  


He leaves the bag of soil on a rack near his car in the barn, stumbles to the back door which he had left open for him. He wants to lay down in his bed and hide in the world forever. That’s, actually - he should do that. He closes the door behind him, finds Tommy has already set out the seeds and books on the counter. When he sorts through them, a little stiff and tired, he finds The Book Thief is not among them. He peeks idly around the house, and Tommy is nowhere to be seen either. When he wanders upstairs, though, his door is closed. The idea of coming in and just hiding from the world while he reads flits by, brief and tempting. Philippe needs a recharge, though, and that seems like too much. Crossing lines he shouldn’t.

  
  


He pulls out the extra down comforter shoved in his dresser, a little practiced and robotic. He makes a pile out of all his blankets, and just sits in the middle, curled up, blankets draped over him, blocking light and making everything a little quieter. He breathes, feels a thousand times better.

  
  


This is good.

  
  


Philippe didn’t hate talking to people. Or, people talking at him, most the time - It was nice. He just didn’t know how to, most the time, and he’d always be overly drained by the time he was just with himself, like he’d performed a major performance in front of millions of people for hours and it was a disaster, when he’d really just gone to work for a day and said nothing to no one. By choice. For the past 21 years. He figured the world owed him much for the quiet moments. He was two. He didn’t even get to remember what happened, beyond colors and noise.

  


He liked the downtimes. It was just quiet enough he could hear himself think, which was always caught between too quiet to hear or too loud to function. He lets himself wonder, thinks about when he ran away as a kid, thinks about how to keep ignoring the impending doom of guilt, thinks about England flower seeds, and closes his eyes. He thinks about rosemary tea and soft hands, ocean waves and piano keys. He tries to remember the notes to Blue Suede Shoes on the piano, but can’t remember all of them. His ears are filled with laughter and glass clinking, of the piano and the base next to him following the lead. And, all too suddenly, his head is filled with bright blue eyes and warped English. Philippe snaps his head up after resting it on his knees, not knowing he had started falling asleep at all.

  
  
  


“Philippe,” Tommy says again, questioning in the doorway.

  
  
  


He shifts, as an answer, sending the question right back quietly. Tommy comes closer, book and hand, and opens it up. “It’s in French,” he says, and it hits him they bought the wrong one, the English version was right next to it on the shelf. “I can’t read it.”

  
  


“You want to return it?” Philippe asks, a little self-conscious in a pile of blankets.

  


“Actually, I was thinking,” he says, cutting himself off, flexing his fingers and picking at the seam of his shirt, a little too big. It speaks volumes in itself. He outstretches his arm, holding out the book.

  
  


“I stutter,” He reasons, a little cautious, trying to prove how bad of an idea this was. His throat was just getting used to being used again, the rawness of it all breaking away. He’d need at least a glass of water and cough medicine, just so there was something left of his voice by tomorrow.

  
  
  


“I don’t mind,” Tommy says, looking him in the eye. Philippe’s everything cracks, at that, and he isn’t sure how visible that is, but he takes the book as Tommy plops down next to him. He never asked about why he stuttered, the intensity of it, or his decision to not talk. He recognized him as somebody else, way back when, and he wonders if maybe whoever he was supposed to be to Tommy was exactly the same. Who didn’t talk and thought about piano keys and foreign countries, who only knew French inherently and was always thinking two steps faster than he should be, going and going until he tripped.

  
  


Maybe they were nothing alike.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


________________________________________________________

  
  


                                 

 

 

  *****A SMALL THEORY*****

  
  


_People observe the colors of a day only at its beginnings and ends, but to me, it’s quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. A single_ _hour_ _can consist of a thousand different colors._

 

__Markus Zusak, The Book Thief_ _

 

 

  
  
  
  


 

________________________________________________________

  
  
  
  
  


“I don’t know anything about you,” Tommy says one day, lounging on the couch.

  
  


Philippe is planting the flowers prematurely in small planting pots, so he can relocate them once they’re grown. It wasn’t often he got stuff to grow, and the soil around his house was bad. He shoots him a frown, at that, picking seeds out of their packets. _Yes, you do._

  
  


“No, I don’t,” he heaves, frustrated. “I don’t know your favorite color. Or who your family is. How old you are,” he grumbles, letting his head thud against the armrest. “I don’t know anything.”

  
  


Philippe quiets, at that. Not because he doesn’t know how to respond, or isn’t going to at all - he doesn’t remember how to say twenty-three in English. He scoops out some more soil, his hands dirtied, just deep enough to bury the poinsettias. “Green,” he says, watching the seeds fall in, eyes flicking between them and Tommy. “And, two three?”

  
  


“Blue,” Tommy echoes. “One nine.”

  
  


He smirks when Philippe raises his eyebrows. And he feels sick all of a sudden, because that was far too young to be in a war, to be traumatized. He should’ve been going to college, or something, being smart in all the ways Tommy was. The poinsettias aren’t as exciting, anymore, and he buries them under the dirt along with all his feelings.

  
  
  


“What about your family?” Tommy asks, turning to watch him as he moves on to the next plant. He sort of tenses at that, but keeps putting the soil in the pot.

  
  


“Just my mother,” he says. “My father died. We do not speak.” Philippe’s eyebrows furrow at the explanation, short, an entire lifetime of meaning left out of it. He can’t remember the last time his mother had called. It had to be at least two years. The only reason he could afford his place when he first bought it, really, was because he had ran from his mother and her french stigmatic idea of upper classness again, and he hated it, so he took and he ran. And he never came back, and she never called. “I have a step sister,” he adds thoughtfully, a little warm at that, the existence of someone. “Claudette. I do not know where she is.”

  
  
  


He hadn’t seen her since they were kids. She was apart of the cycle of families, but she was the only one that really stuck with him. They used to call whenever they could, which was not very often at all. She was the only person at the time who didn’t mind waiting the extra minute to listen to him, despite being younger and impatient. He can smile, at that, because who would imagine a hundred-year-old WWII soldier, still not twenty, would stumble in and top that list?

  
  
  


_Sorry,_ Tommy says, frowning but not really frowning at all.

  
  
  


_Not your fault,_ Philippe shrugs, more than true and a little sad. It’s back to the relative quiet, then, which is calming and not uncomfortable like it is with everyone else, just a shared content to not need words. He can practically feel Tommy marveling, eyes never leaving. He pointedly does not ask about Tommy’s family.

  
  


It occurs to Philippe how much he doesn’t want the conversation to end. He could leave it at that, the simplicity of a broken family. Maybe it’s the eagerness to open the box, but---

  


“What movies do you like?” He asks, and Tommy just rolls his head over to look at him as he flusters for the right words in English. “Um, what types?”

  
  


Tommy blinks, for a second, before humming in thought. “All of them, I guess. I like the ones that tell stories.”

  
  


_All of them tell stories_ , Phillippe frowns at him without ever really moving to frown at all. _That’s not what I meant,_ Tommy seems to say back, with furrowed eyebrows and a puff of air between his lips. “Like Monsters Inc, I think. There’s stuff behind it.”

  
  


Philippe nods. He can understand that. The story behind the story, just being picked up along the way as if you were apart of the character’s lives this whole time. He tries to think of an example. “Ah - Singles?”

  
  


“Not really,” Tommy says. “Singles is more like, coincidences.”

  
  


“Coincidences?” He repeats, stuttering.

  
  


“In Monsters Inc it wasn’t really, they didn’t stop to describe it. The telly was the only thing they used to explain the story,” Tommy says, waving his hands and staring at the ceiling fan spinning. Philippe smiles at the little quirk, a little distracted from shoveling the leftover soil spilled on the table back into the bag. “With Singles, they stopped the story to explain it.”

  
  


_How does that explain the coincidences?_ He thinks, eyebrows barely creasing before Tommy picks it up.

  
  


“Everything happens on accident,” he says. “Steve happens to meet Linda at a concert. Cliff happens to be a dick,” Tommy rolls his head and blinks at him, and Philippe glances up to catch his eyes, just for a second. He’s listening.

  
  


“Boo is not?” Philippe says, quietly, tying off the rest of the bag with a rubber band. It takes Tommy a second to piece together what he said, over the sound.

  
  


“No. Randle brought the door. Guess it is kind of coincidence, though. It’s -”

  
  


“Cause and effect,” Philippe supplies.

  
  


“Yeah,” Tommy says, and it ends at that, for a while. It’s not the first conversation between them that has lead to being a little philosophical. Philippe keeps scooping soil off the table and tying away the fertilizer and soil. He leaves, for a second, to place the bags outside and pour out the watering can. Tommy is still there, staring at the ceiling by the time he returns, rubbing the dirt on his hands off on his pants. Tommy curls his legs to let him sit down but promptly puts them on his lap after he’s rested. Philippe has no complaints.

  
  


“Do you think I’m a coincidence?” Tommy says. Philippe looks at him, for all that he is. He’s looking at him, eyes a little empty and light blue, void of the waves of the darker blue that waves in the emotion. His hair is wet from a shower and he’s wearing a _You Mess With The Crabo You Get The Stabo_ shirt with a picture of a crab holding a knife, and he has PTSD from being a WWII veteran, still nineteen.

  
  
  


“No,” Philippe says, with all honesty.

  
  
  


Tommy lets out a loud bitter laugh, and as brief as it had appeared, the surprising sound that leaves his eyes wide is gone only moments after, replaced by an unfathomable depth of sorrow.

  
  
  
  
  


________________________________________________________

  
  
  
  
  


It’s a slow day at work when it happens.

  
  


Philippe was working the register because it was allergy season and at least two people had called in sick. He hated it, tried to say as little as possible, including announcing people’s totals. He could hear, and he could talk, but that doesn’t mean he liked to. It came as a sudden realization, one day, like a lightning bolt shooting through his veins, that the only person he really liked talking to was Tommy. Which, even then---

  
  


His phone rings. Buzzes, along with the sound of bells, the default ringtone he never bothered to change. He loses everything when he recognizes the number as his house phone. He answers it, heart in his throat, ready to bolt on his feet and run. “What’s wrong?” he blurts before Tommy can even say hello. His accent is thick.

  
  


Philippe can barely hear anything. He has to focus hard on what he’s even saying, partly interpreting the English, partly because he’s so terrified he can barely use any of his basic functions. “Nothing,” Tommy says, and then, just as fast, “I was going to get you lunch. What do you want?”

  
  
  


It’s too fast. Every possible problem was running through his head, including the fear that Tommy was _gone_ or just in his head, someone too impossible to keep in his reality or to have existed at all. And then nothing, too sudden for his ringing ears, for his heart, a thousand beats a second. His legs collapse under him and he bangs his elbow on the way down, hand still holding the phone to his ear and the other tightly gripping the counter of the register as he stares wide-eyed at the trashcan beneath it, like it’s going to swallow him alive. The collapse is a shock to himself, even more sudden. Dizzy. His ears are ringing. It’s high pitched, and he almost winces, waits for it to fade away. Philippe’s eyes hurt, and he remembers to blink.

  


When the ringing fades, slow and painful like the dragging of a body away from you, danger averted and gone, something just passing. When the ringing fades, Philippe clears his throat of the snot and the tears, and he realizes he’s been crying. Too quiet. He’s breathing a little too fast. He can’t see. When the ringing fades, all he can hear is Tommy.

  
  


“Philippe? Can you hear me? Jesus Christ,” and he hears shuffling in the background, like sheets moving, like steam sizzling, like the ocean as his skin deteriorates, long since dead. _I can, I can hear you,_ he thinks, but his throat is clogged and it’s not enough and all he can do is make a weak sound, a little animal and broken. He doesn’t even have a word for it. He’s blinking away the black spots in his vision and rubbing at his eyes.

  


“Come home,” Tommy says abruptly. Philippe shifts, moving from his crouched position to a little more folded, criss-cross. The tears keep coming, and he swallows and keeps wiping them away. “You have the car. Come home, right fucking now, because I can't come get you.” He reasons.

  
  


He could. He hasn’t taken a day off since he’s gotten the job--- he rarely got sick, he had no special events, nobody to spend holidays with, no family emergencies, no friends to visit. He had plenty of days stocked up. He could probably take the week if he wanted. He could, he could come home, with someone to come home to, could watch obscure movies with.  Not just with anybody. He could hide away.

  
  


“Okay,” Philippe whispers, wobbly and a little stuttered. _“Okay.”_

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The drive back is long. Longer than usual, really, despite him already living a little on the outskirts. His hands do not shake.

  
  


His tears have long since dried. His mother once told him as a child he was a pretty crier, rather morbidly. Philippe just cried quietly, in his own time and hidden away, and he never had any snot or red eyes after. You could barely realize he was sad, really. He always thought eyes were the way to the soul. His mother's were empty. She had none.

  


He grieved the same, quiet and in his own time. When he was five he had a goldfish, as old as him, and it died. He did not follow the trend of flushing it even if that's what every movie he had seen said to do, just innocent and five with a broken voice, but he buried it. A fish in the ground.

  
  
  


Is that what this was? Grieving?

  
  
  


When Philippe rolled up to the gravel wrapping around the house and into the barn he was pretty sure was eight seconds into collapsing, Tommy had already opened the back door and was gently padding through the rocks, wincing, barefoot.

  
  


He pulls Philippe into an immediate hug, and waps at his chest a little. “You're stupid,” Tommy says.

  
  


And all he can think is _I love you,_ in a voice unheard, and all the stress and worry both comes back and leaves him. Like two tsunami's crashing together in the middle of the ocean, a bomb underwater. He lets himself be hugged and makes sure to hug Tommy back, now just a little less wire-y than when he had arrived. He's an inch or so taller than him and his hands are calloused and he's 98 years old at nineteen and his favorite color is blue like everyone else and he's still kind of hitting him, but he's perfect and all Philippe can numbly think is _I love you._

  
  


Undoubtedly. Without question. He falters, just for a second, because the words are so strong and he has never really gotten to feel them as strongly as he does, because Philippe is human and his head is a constant state of a thousand kilometers every half a second, despite it all rendering into one thought, a sentence branching into a billion forgotten other ones, never read. It doesn’t take any longer than a second. He loves him, whatever that means and however far that reaches. He loves him. Undoubtedly. Without question.

  
  
  


_I thought I lost you,_ Philippe thinks, but it never reaches Tommy. He can’t see his eyes. He hugs him a little tighter if it means anything.

  
  
  


“It’s okay,” Tommy says. “You’re home.” and he smiles, at that, because Tommy was kind of an oddball. He read actions much better than words, a little too awkward with talking, like everything else. A little too tall for himself, too, awkward in motion. He was probably going to get taller, he was ninety-eight going twenty.

  
  
  


He becomes a little bit more aware of himself, of hugging Tommy in the middle of his driveway, his car door still open. He lets loose one arm to close it, grasping at air and missing, before he lets go of the hug altogether to close it. The problem is the rocks are loose, and he stumbles back into the door, and it closes behind him, knocks against his spine. The pain is so sudden and sharp it leaves him a little breathless, and then he’s leaning against the car and---

  
  
  
  


 

Oh.

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQEzSCdPT08


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Philippe has to come to terms with himself. How to give up and let something grow as slow as it needs to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah! sorry this one is shorter than usual,, its just a little less. My usual goal is 5,000 at least, but. I thought something would be much better than nothing at all, you guys deserve that.

________________________________________________________

  
  
  


“It was an accident,” Tommy says immediately.

  


Philippe just stares at him, a little dumbly, still out of breath. He hadn’t realized his hand was still interlocked with Tommy’s, he hadn’t realized he had pulled him with him. Their hands together is an endless kind of feeling, something just that is, like breathing and blinking. Natural, like they’ve been doing it for a billion years, when really it was only a couple weeks and the rare times when one of them was having a breakdown. All he can think about is how chapped Tommy’s lips are, and how he didn’t notice how much he chewed at it before. They feel rough and a little scarred, and then Tommy is pointing the finger at him.

  
  


“Right?” He says, a little hurriedly like he’s afraid Philippe was going to punch him or throw him out of the street. It’s something he would never do, but he has every right to think that. He can’t imagine even a quarter of the things he's probably seen. He can’t even nod to reassure him, a solid part of him doesn’t want to. Philippe doesn’t want to say no. Doesn’t want to say yes. He just stares, a little wide-eyed, heaving for breath. Tommy’s entire face falls, and his eyes are so clear he thinks, for once, maybe this is what it’s like when he’s angry. A hurricane.

  
  


_You didn’t mean to do that,_ His eyes say, questioning, darting around as they scan his face. _You didn’t mean to---_

  
  


_No,_ Philippe shakes his head frantically. He really didn’t mean to.

  
  


“An accident,” Tommy nods, and he’s stepping further away.

  
  


Philippe lets him. He doesn’t want it to be an accident. A glimpse of something impossibly good, for once, it’s not crazy he’d want that. He feels like crumbling to the ground, and his head is so many paces slower all he can picture is rubbing the crumbs on a muffin off bit by bit, until it’s nothing but crumbs and a fallen mess. He wants to be that, nothing left. It’s like being trapped in a glass box, and all the good things of the world pass and exist around you, sweet and a possibility, but the glass is thick and you’re tied to keep watch of all the bad things, so the good things can pass.

 

But Tommy cracked the glass, just bad enough for the worst to scramble out. He has every right to be afraid. Had every right to not want to take the door in.

  


And it’s not like Philippe isn’t a mess, either--- he’s been rolling with the crazy idea Tommy is a WWII soldier, stuck in time. Lost? Stuck? Was there a difference?

  
  


_(Did he choose to come here?)_

  
  


They need time. Tommy needs time to not be afraid, anymore, of all that is scared of him. And he probably needs to see a therapist for his trauma and he probably needs to be around more diversity, to see all the differences and the okays and the goods. Philippe needed time to process. He was seriously going to have a heart attack if he didn't take time to process this, loving someone he barely knows, wanting to know, the time travel thing, Tommy at all.

  
  


Tommy slips away. Philippe says nothing. He never does.

  
  
  
  
  


________________________________________________________

  
  
  


_As with many of the others, when I began my journey away, there seemed a quick shadow again, a final moment of exposed eclipse--- the recognition of another soul gone._

_  
_ _  
_ _You see, to me, for just a moment, despite all the colors that touch and grapple with what I see in this world, I will often catch an eclipse when a human dies._

 

_  
_ _I've seen millions of them._

 

_  
_ _I've seen more eclipses than I care to remember._

 

  
  
__Markus Zusak, The Book Thief_ _

 

  
  


________________________________________________________

  
  
  


Philippe does not start avoiding Tommy, after that. He doesn't. He's not hurt about pretending it never happened. He's not hurt.

  
  
  


He's not.

  
  


The routine continues, as the days move on. Philippe cooks them both dinner and lets Tommy read out the ingredients to him, help him gradually know it by memory. He looks up ways to get to know a person, and the only thing that sticks with him is the 21 questions thing, although he doesn't really get the rules and neither does Tommy.

  


“What's your favorite animal?” Tommy asks, resting his chin on his hand while Philippe cuts open potatoes, sliding a few in the oven. He has to mull over it for a second, the lack of thought into it pretty obvious.

  


“Dog,” he says. Tommy hums.

  


“Elephant,” he says. If the edges of his lips quirk up, just a bit, nobody has to know. “Favorite season?”

  
  


“ _Printemps,”_ he says after forgetting the word, mind drifting absently to that department store named Printemps. “Aft - After winter,” he chokes out, having to cough between words to get them out. He thinks he's getting sick.

  


“Summer,” Tommy says simply. “When’s that done?”

  


He shrugs, and Tommy takes the hand resting on the recipe to flip it up, looking at what's the potatoes. He remembers, already pulling Bell peppers out of the fridge, but he lets him look anyway. Their interactions have become incredibly mundane, for all its worth. There were really already established boundaries in their conversations, don’t talk about how Tommy got here or why, don’t talk about if he’ll disappear, don’t talk about the kiss. He immediately stiffens at the memory, because he keeps wandering back to it. Tommy flops the card back down, and his eyes drift away, along with his thoughts.

  


The silence is peaceful. He thinks it’s probably the most talkative moment for both of them, because neither of them are really good at it anyway. Philippe, because his throat is a whole complicated, aching mess, and Tommy who stutters and stumbles over the words, getting too mixed up in talking before thinking. It’s good, though, because they can get their thoughts across through motions and looks. And it’s probably a little unnatural, but Philippe’s grown up reading people and he doesn’t really know how Tommy grew up, but it had to be something if he just can _understand,_ in the way nobody else could really figure out. So Tommy says _I’m tired_ through his blinks and the hissing of the steam from the pot of noodles, and Philippe says _me too_ through the quirks of his lips and the quick stirring before checking the timer on the oven. And there are no other sounds but him cooking and eventually the oven timer going off, and it’s peaceful.

  


Most dinners they have involved spaghetti in some matter because it was the first and only thing he knew how to cook for a while, until he figured out the magic of Kraft Macaroni and Instant Ramen and TV dinners, and suddenly being thirteen and -- a little distantly --  French was exciting. Tonight wasn’t much different, though, because this time there was a buttered potato on the side, and he’d say he’s probably done better tonight than he has in the last week.

  


And it’s fine, really, until Tommy gets a whole line of buttery grease on his cheek because he eats like he’d been starving since he appeared here _(and he_ **_was,_ ** _and he was probably starving long before then, longer than Philippe’s been alive)_ and he smiles, a little thin-lipped and subconsciously, before he reaches out and mutters “You have--”

 

Before the car door slams into his spine, again, and Philippe freezes up and jerks his arm away frantically like it had been burned. He hits his elbow along the way, and he looks away and sips his water, nothing having happened at all. And he tries not to pretend how hurt Tommy is by it, because he can feel the hurt in his own bones like an anchor tied to his feet, and he tries to pretend like he’s not eating a little faster to excuse himself to bed because he’s not. He’s just tired.

  


He’s always been ridiculously bad at lying to himself. It’s a useless front, because he already knows and will always know the truth, and will say it if you ask the right question, but it’s easier to lie to yourself that people like you rather than that nobody does, has ever at all.

  


A papercut can be a gaping, bloody hole in your chest if you look right, but nobody ever does.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


It’s later, around one or two in the morning, when he wakes up from the same dream of drowning and remembers he forgot to do the dishes. Tommy’s door is wide open, so he has to tiptoe around the creaks and moans of the floorboards to reach the stairs, and even then he swears a few times when it does. And it won’t change anything, not really, because doing the dishes is loud and he isn’t sure what time it is. The house is cold, and it occurs to him there’s wind blowing the house around outside, whistling through the fields nearby. He shouldn’t be here.

  


He does the dishes because he’d already gotten up anyway, slow and steady to not be too loud. But if there is no sound of the clattering, there is the sound of the water, and if there isn’t any water there’s the wind outside, the feeling of impending doom that he shouldn’t be here, witnessing something straight out of a horror movie, ethereal and not made for him. It was only inevitable he woke Tommy up.

  


Because there’s a shadowy figure in his door when he looks up from the stairs, carefully watching where he memorized the creaks. They’re leaning out the doorway, hand on the frame, staring at him. And he doesn’t recognize who it is until there’s a bright flash of lightning from the window at the end of the hall, and he catches a familiar jawline. The crackle of noise afterward is what snaps him back to reality, and he’s lurching backward down a few steps, gasping for air.

  


_“Merde,”_ he gasps, forgetting himself. “Tommy, you scared me.”

  


And Tommy doesn’t move, still, and dark. And then all too suddenly, he pulls away back into his room, shutting his door with a loud _thud._ And behind him, Philippe lingered, before dragging the same thought back up the steps.

  
  
  


You scared me, Tommy.

  
  
  
  
  


________________________________________________________

  
  
  
  


Two days blur by, after that, and every day when he comes home Philippe reads The Book Thief.

  


It’s almost starting to trend to be as common as their movie nights, but Tommy has only now started insisting he read it to him when he hadn’t before. And every time he sits uncomfortable, the silent question of _but I stutter_ still there, and every single time Tommy tells him he doesn’t mind.

 

They’re almost halfway through the book, now, but it’s hard to tell which chapter when there is no number, but they’re on Liesel’s Lecture if it means anything. And because it is always still technically the middle of the day when they start reading it, they read chapter after chapter, going and going until they’re at the part where Max gets sick from the snow, leaves the chapter at that, and looks to find Tommy. Even though he’s right there. To see what he thinks.

 

His eyes are soft, and he just stares. “He reminds me of you,” he says, quietly and he tilts his head a little at that, eyes softening deafeningly back. “Of Gibson,” He says, and then his eyebrows twitch to frown, hurt by himself, unsure.

  


And it really hits him, this time, that he’s supposed to be somebody else to Tommy. He’s supposed to be Gibson, from 1940, Still French and probably long since dead, that he knows nothing about, and Tommy has nothing to mourn, nothing of his past left. Just memories and himself, and Philippe, who is the only reminder of what isn’t, the biggest curse of all. He can physically hear his heart crack, but it might just be in his head. He didn’t think it could do that, anymore.

  


“Tell me about him,” he says. “About Gibson.”

  


And he thinks Tommy’s going to, about what he was like or his interests, but instead, he tilts his head back and gives him a watery, sad smile. “I can’t,” he says. “I barely knew anything about him.”

  
  


And Philippe just reaches forward, grabs his hand, if only for himself. “Then tell me what you do.”

  
  


So Tommy does. He tells him that they look exactly like, same curly hair and expressive eyes, same unique jaw you couldn’t really find anywhere else. He tells him Gibson never spoke a word almost the entire time he was with him, and it reminds him so painfully of himself he squeezes his hand. He tells him he was always antsy, that he stayed outside in the cold the entire time they went on a ship, destined to sink, and that he was pretty sure he was the one who opened the door and to save him from drowning. He tells him he was kind, in the way he left out a rope for him after, to drag him along with them in the lifeboat. He told him his clothes were a size too big but also a size too small, stuck too far in between to be just right. He told him he was almost always shaking, in some form. He told them about when they washed up on the beach, and when he woke up, Gibson was curled above him, soaked, barely shaking, staring at him. If he was anything like Philippe, he would’ve looked at him then like he was his entire world.

  
  


Tommy tells Philippe all this before he tells him Gibson’s story. He tells him who he was first, who he could’ve been if he had time to ask. He has a feeling not many people were like Tommy, on that. He had a feeling there wasn’t anybody to ask, anyway. Because nobody really knew Gibson’s name, and his body was buried beneath the sea, unidentified and trapped. And--

  
  


“The dream,” Philippe whispers, voice catching on his throat, on the one curse.

  


“What?” Tommy says, and then just as fast as it occurs to him, “Oh.” And squeezes his hand.

  


“Who am I?” Philippe asks, and it's much too broken and hurt than he means it to be, too stuck on the thought that all the similarities line up far too much, that he’s somehow supposed to be someone that never was, but doesn’t know how.

  


Tommy does not answer.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Hours later, when they’ve warmed back up enough to a comfortable silence, and a little bit of commenting on the movie for movie night, Tommy mentions stargazing. And Philippe gets a little excited, has to pause the movie, because he’s been doing that since he was a kid, and he’s always wanted to do it again. He doesn’t really know why he never kept that up. He’d take books and books from the library about constellations, and thoroughly read every one, try and point out the ones to himself when he peeked out their apartment window. And he’d always read them aloud, and say _look, I found it,_ even when there was nobody home but him, nobody to judge his stutter. Tommy tells him he was never much for stargazing, tended to be too tired at night when he was home to stay up, spending all working on his farm. “Was the Depression, n’ all that,” he said.

  


And Philippe wants to smile painfully at that, imagining a kid in France staring up at the skies, a child of the early thousands, with an empty bowl of the food he makes and wondering who it’s going to be tonight. And years earlier, Tommy, a child of the early 30s, in France and sitting on a beach of death with no food to call his own, starving, staring at the very same stars and wondering the same exact thing.

  
  


_Do you want to?_ Philippe mouths, because he really is getting sick and his throat hurts. Tommy has been getting awful good at reading lips, anyway. He’d do anything for him.

  
  


“Where would we go?” Tommy asks, and his voice is flat.

  
  


_Up,_ he points. _Or,_ he shrugs. And he clicks the TV screen off, reaching for Tommy’s hand, and pulls him away. He does not mention the zing of electricity thrumming through his arm as he leads him up the stars, and through Tommy’s bedroom (a title so easily replaced, because it was his, it can always be his, if he wants) and does not mention not wanting to let go. He stops to nab a few extra blankets from his closet, and lets go of his hand. There are no locks on the windows, badly as he needs them, so it slides all the way up with crooked easy, just enough for a person to squeeze through. He really should know better, considering he’d grown up in bigger places.

  


_Watch,_ he tells Tommy, because he needs to know how to get on the roof. He’s kind of glad it was designed to be flat, makes falling once you’re up easier. Just getting up hard. He pulls himself out the window, back first, gripping the top of it from outside. And the edge to the roof, a grip away, leaves him heaving as he pulls himself over it, flopping onto his rock covered roof.

  
  


And the stars are bright. And somewhere else, they could be brighter. Brighter than a bomb soaring over Dunkirk. Brighter than a meteor shower over Paris. And he just lays there, and heaves, turning his head when he hears Tommy grunt as he pulls himself over. And he stares back at him, something a little unrecognizable on his face, eyes twinkling with the reflections, before his face bleeds into a dopey grin, shoving the pile on blankets onto Philippe’s chest.

  
  
  


And if he shivers, whether from the cold or the pure, unadulterated love he’s felt, bursting his everything at the seams, nobody has to know it was the latter.

  
  
  
  
  


________________________________________________________

  
  
  
  


_Each night, Liesel would step outside, wipe the door, and watch the sky. Usually it was like spillage-- cold and heavy, slippery and gray --- but once in a while some stars had the nerve to rise and float, if only for a few minutes. On those nights, she would stay a little longer and wait._

  


_"Hello, stars."_

  


_Waiting._

  


 

 

Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

 

 

 

 

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**Author's Note:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffyKY3Dj5ZE&list=LLwDHqzL6BxugFkAG1xYaKAw&index=8&t=0s haha sorry i just, watch this if you need a warm up


End file.
